New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

ROLAND BARTHES, In the Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

ROLAND BARTHES, Mythologies

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

ROLAND BARTHES, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.